Does social media use have a positive or negative impact on civic engagement? The cynical “slacktivism hypothesis” holds that if citizens use social media for political conversation, those conversations will be fleeting and vapid. Most attempts to answer this question involve public opinion data from the United States, so we […]

(This post originally appeared as “Let’s Build Democracy Robots” on Slate. Read Jillian York’s great retort “No We Should Not Build Pro-Democracy Twitter Bots“) Most Twitter users try to ignore messages from robot accounts. But maybe we should be putting bots to work for a more noble cause—democracy. One estimate […]